B2B stands for… Back to Business!

With 262 rooms and 14 meeting rooms, Crowne Plaza Antwerpen is the largest hotel in the most populous metropolitan area in Belgium. The vibrant city is literally bursting with fashion, shopping, gastronomy, culture and historical architecture, so whatever is on your city trip checklist, Antwerp has it all!

The building itself belongs to Pandox, a leading owner of hotel properties in Northern Europe, under the license of the IHG Hotels & Resorts group. Due to its unique location just south of the city center, only 30 minutes west of Brussels Airport and virtually halfway between the Netherlands and France, it is also a very popular choice for various conferences and business meetings.

The on-site Meeting & Events team helps you plan your events, both big and small. 16th-floor rooms feature spectacular view overlooking the skyline of Antwerp. Flexible spaces off the lobby are perfect for casual meetings. Business-ready services and amenities include digital concierge and, as of lately, a new, highly-secure, high-density and high-capacity Wi-Fi.

The latter is an especially vital element of any business travel checklist. So when the pandemic led to lockdowns and widespread travel disruption, the hotel’s IT staff decided not to sit idly by and fix problems that had been identified even before the ill-fated 2020…

“Our previous Wi-Fi solution was a raster, and due to that fact we always had some blind corners. We were also experiencing growing problems with our hotspots – they simply couldn't take the full load of the growing number of guest connections, often from more than one wireless device, not to mention the IPTV connected to the hotspots”, says Luc Westerlinck, Chief Engineer & Safety Advisor at the Crowne Plaza Antwerpen hotel. “In time, we were getting more and more complaints from the guests and we needed to do something about them. That is why in 2020 I decided to advance our Wi-Fi solution”.

In the world of networking, the key to great outcomes often lies in preparation and proper testing. If the pandemic brought anything positive, it was the gift of time and opportunity to look for an optimal solution. For the Crowne Plaza Antwerpen, that time would come rather sooner than later.

In 2021 Luc Westerlinck and his team were approached with a request to provide connectivity for a two-day, hybrid/livestream conference for 38 people working simultaneously from the hotel rooms. Having received an offer from Extreme some time earlier, Luc turned to Peter Degelin, Senior Account Executive at the Extreme Networks Benelux team, with a proposition.

“I asked Peter if he could provide the solution we talked about earlier. The video conference was actually a great opportunity to see the Extreme products in action before moving on with a wide-scale modernization”, says Luc Westerlinck. “The Extreme team were quick on their feet, everything went very smoothly. Together we installed and configured 38 new hotspots. And the conference went just perfectly, connections for all our guests were just spot on. It only confirmed that our initial choice was right”.

Following the “experiment”, each of the 262 hotel rooms and 14 meeting rooms at Crowne Plaza Antwerpen were equipped with new access points from Extreme. The choice fell on the next-generation, Wi-Fi 6 enabled AP302W model with the user-selectable choice of Extreme’s flagship Wi-Fi operating systems, supporting both on-premises and cloud-management.

“With more users, more devices, more applications, and unfortunately more threats straining the infrastructure, the next-generation access points from Extreme are engineered to meet those challenges”, says Peter Degelin. “Our devices combine powerful 802.11ax technology, advanced security and ML/AI management capabilities together into an enterprise class solution that allowed the highly congested network environment at Crowne Plaza Antwerpen to deploy high speed, high capacity and highly secure Wi-Fi”.

Moving from around 30 to nearly 300 hotspots required additional power per floor. Following the Wi-Fi modernization project, the IT team at the Crowne Plaza Antwerpen decided to also upgrade their existing edge switching infrastructure. Today, the 40-port edge switches from Extreme, connected via fiber optic down to the legacy core switches, provide PoE+ for all access points. The Extreme powered Wi-Fi network handles the Internet, voice and video and, according to Luc Westerlinck, “Everything is working like a charm”.

Although it's now been two years since the start of the pandemic, travel and hospitality sector is still operating with a high level of uncertainty and unexpected events. However, for the Crowne Plaza Antwerpen, even that cloud had a silver lining. Due to the strict lockdown measures imposed by the government in the Netherlands, by the end of 2021 the hotel was fully booked with Dutchmen. It was a perfect opportunity to see how the new network performed in a target, highly congested environment.

“Our hotel has a fiber optic connection performing up to 1 Gigabit. An average TV streaming service is a 10-20 Gigabit connection on an evening. And if we’re fully booked and everyone’s using their phones and laptops as well, we’re looking at nearly 300 rooms times 2-3 people times 10 Gigabit. So that’s quite a lot of capacity needed on the network”, says Luc Westerlinck. “We’ve seen first-hand that the network performs flawlessly during the peak time, proving that the solution ensures more uptime time and greater stability, even in the most arduous of circumstances”.

For the highly business-oriented hotels like Crowne Plaza Antwerpen, cyber-security of their guests is not an option – it’s a must. After all, no establishment would like to see their name getting slammed in the press because one of the guests got hacked when he or she was on the job. Which is why Luc and Peter decided to enhance security both on the switching and the access point level.
 
“We VLANed the complete network for data, voice, and video. Together with Hans van Damme, my colleague from the Extreme team, we remotely reconfigured all the switches and all the access points to logically separate the networks in the hotel, so the AP302W in the room has different VLANs for TV, voice, telephone system, and also for the Internet”, says Peter Degelin. “We conducted multiple security tests which proved to us that everything is now fully secured and separated”.

The AP302W access points provide context-based security and performance optimization especially designed for multi-dwelling environments, through an onboard stateful L2-L7 DPI firewall, advanced and customizable Quality of Service (QoS) for traffic optimization, encrypted client tunneling.

With the renovation of the meeting rooms planned for summer 2022, the IT team at the Crowne Plaza Antwerpen is also entertaining the possibility of implementing Private Client Groups.

“We will most certainly be looking for ways and solutions to additionally increase security of the meeting rooms. That’s very important for many reasons, e.g. sometimes we are having doctors participating remotely in live-streamed surgeries. We need to make 100% sure they’re not connected with anybody else, but the hospital”, Luc Westerlinck explains.

Increased Wi-Fi uptime, stability and security is one thing. Managing the network easily and with scale – that’s another pair of shoes. From the very beginning of the modernization project, Luc and his colleagues from the network maintenance team looked for a software defined, single pane of glass solution that would enable unified network management of access points and switches while delivering an end-to-end visibility and insightful analytics – and all that at a moment’s notice, from any device, at any given time.

The choice fell on the ExtremeCloud IQ.

“Earlier we would receive calls at odd hours like 3:00 AM, saying there’s a problem with the Internet. You can imagine what that meant for us. Now we can simply pick up the phone, go to the cloud connection and quickly verify if the problem has anything to do with the network”, says Luc Westerlinck. “ExtremeCloud IQ streamlines many of our network operations, making the job easier for everyone”.

What’s also interesting, the AP302W access points belong to the next-generation line of Extreme Universal Platforms which combine the power of cloud management with the ability to support multiple deployment use cases through nothing more than a simple change of the software or feature set.

“Universal Platforms increase flexibility and reduce hardware obsolescence and total cost of ownership by allowing the Crowne Plaza Antwerpen to gradually adopt new technologies or change their desired use case, while preserving the hardware and even the associated licenses”, Peter Degelin explains.

The basic operating concept of any hotel is to treat your guests like family and make them feel at home, and that of course extends to the guest networks. Once you've crossed that off your checklist, it’s time to think about your own network…

“We’ve already decided to follow the same path and replace our legacy core switches with Extreme products. They will have more ports, they will be much quieter, but perhaps most importantly – we will make sure that everything is in one line and we have a complete, end-to-end networking solution from Extreme”, says Luc Westerlinck. “We’re also considering installing AP4000 access points in the restaurants and lobby to unlock new capacity with the 6 GHz frequency spectrum and meet new demands and challenges from Wi-Fi 6E enabled clients”.

“We’re all the more happy with our cooperation, especially given the fact that the Extreme team in Benelux knows Crowne Plaza Antwerpen very well – many of our customer facing meetings in Antwerpen have been organized in the hotel. Actually, we just had a meeting with our partners in February 2022. One could say that providing a reliable and highly efficient networking solution was definitely in everyone's best interest”, Peter Degelin concludes with a tongue-in-cheek smile.